ABSTRACT
From the vantage point of the 1990s it is difficult to remember a time when questions of equal opportunities and the complex relationship between gender and education were not high profile. This has not always been the case and there are certainly no grounds for complacency since major inequalities and differences of experience still exist in our educational system between girls and boys and women and men and, indeed, between a number of other groupings; many of these are mirrored in other areas of society. One of the main social science associations in Great Britain, for example, the British Sociological Association, only formally began to take seriously sexual divisions by setting up study groups as late as 1976. There is now a clear and strong interest in the relationship between gender and education at a variety of levels. From national government initiatives through to the Equal Opportunities Commission down to LEAs and school and classroom level initiatives, the interest in gender and education is quite rightly extensive.
